Pat Metheny Meets John Zorn in Heaven On Echoes

Hear Pat Metheny talk about Tap: John Zorn’s Book of Angels Tonight on Echoes

You never know quite where guitarist Pat Metheny is going to land. In just the last three years he’s recorded a album with his mechanical orchestra called The Orchestrion, released a solo guitar album of 60 pop cover tunes and now, like an elastic band stretched to one extreme, he’s snapped back to another. In this case it’s a recording of music by iconoclastic avant-garde composer John Zorn, a denizen of New York’s downtown scene for more than three decades. It’s called The Book of Angels. John Zorn doesn’t do interviews, but Pat Metheny does and we talked to him about this surprisingly beautiful CD.

Here’s some of the highlights:

Pat Metheny on John Zorn: He’s also just a really good kind of you know, for lack of a better word, modern classical composer. You know, he writes great notes.

Pat Metheny on Book of Angels: I mean it is I think a burst of inspiration that he wrote 300 pieces of music in a very short period of time. And he’s gotten various musicians of different types to play those pieces. And he calls it the book of angels.

Pat Metheny on the Orchestrion: I mean the Orchestrion for me is now a viable part of everything that I’ll do from now on. And to me it’s a significant development in the set of possibilities that I think exist. You can hear that there’s tons of Orchestion on the record. It was floor to ceiling of those kinds of instruments and deafening.

Hear more about Pat Metheny’s Tap: John Zorn’s Book of Angels Volume 20 tonight on Echoes.

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